The Suffering of Assyrians Under Islam

The history of the Christians of the Middle East is shrouded in obscurity as if
a conspiratorial silence is determined to rivet the last nail in a coffin that
the West has put to rest. Flourishing on this amnesia, we now see new histories
taking over the achievements of their predecessors, strutting about with
pretentious, gleaming vestments of civilizations looted through jihad
usurpation.

In Tabari – the renowned 10th century Muslim scholars – we read that before the
Islamic conquest, Iraq was inhabited by the two Peoples of the Book. In Islamic
parlance it designates Jews and Christians. Jews have lived in Iraq-Assyria –
which constituted a province of the Persian Empire – since their exile there by
Nebuchadnezzar (586 BC). Christianity spread among the inhabitants through those
ancient Jewish communities. They lived side by side in the same villages. Today
there are hardly any Jews left from the numerous diaspora of antique lineage. As
for Assyrian Christianity, it has declined considerably from the time of
Arab-Islamic invasion, and particularly in the past half century.

It is this history of a long agony, interrupted temporarily by brilliant and
peaceful periods, that Frederick P. Isaac, an Assyrian himself, has tried to
recapture. His endeavour is not without difficulties as the frequent destruction
of monasteries and churches – those reliquaries of libraries and history – of
massacres, looting and exiles of Assyrian villagers have spread a silence of
death over the centuries.

Isaac is an heir of this ancient Assyrian history, which he recounts in a simple
and clear language. He also assesses his personal experience, which he decided
to record at his son’s request. The Assyrian diaspora is now questioned by their
second and third generation anxious to discover its roots abandoned by the hasty
flight of the persecuted, and forgotten in the tribulation of exile.

Isaac’s book exposes the religious apartheid condition of Jews and Christians
under shari’a, the traditional Islamic law. He deplores the collusion, after
World War I, of the Western colonial Powers with Muslim authorities against the
indigenous religious minorities. The latter were betrayed and abandoned by
England and France, the Mandate powers. "Thus – he writes – Assyria was
dismembered and its Christian people described as aliens, groups of different
sects of unidentified nationalities.....The aim of the key power brokers was to
deny the Assyrians statehood."(p.130). Though their country has been
appropriated, he writes, the Assyrians are a nation in their own right.

In early 1922 the French and British colonial powers abolished the Assyrian
Resettlement Project in their northern region of Mesopotamia. The rehabilitation
program for the Assyrians was cancelled as well as its relief work and
humanitarian assistance. The Christians were scattered without compensation,
protection and shelter, they were robbed of their homes and treated mercilessly.
England parcelled out Assyria and "sold it to the highest bidder of the four
neighbouring Islamic countries." Isaac’s book is a vibrant call to remind the
world of an ancient Christian people, sacrificed to the West’s policy of Islamic
appeasement. "The international community has a moral obligation to relieve the
Assyrians from this intolerable situation." The Mandate powers had dispossessed
and fragmented a small nation, a crime that must be redressed.

Since the two World Wars, the desire of the Assyrians has always been to live
free from Islamic rule, in their own homeland. But "the West dashed their
expectation for independence from the Islamic domineering rulers." To comply
with Muslim policy, Western nations never considered the Assyrians a separate
people, says Isaac, rather they robbed them of their homeland and delivered them
to their traditional enemies. This policy of duplicity still continues today by
the silence of Western governments, the media, and intellectuals regarding the
fact that indigenous minorities in the Islamic lands "are subjected to
continuous oppression and humiliation. They live in total anxiety. The are in
constant fear of losing their jobs, their properties and their lives."

In his conclusion, the author describes how Iraq "distorts the truth and
falsifies textbooks of history and social studies about the Assyrians.... as a
part of its policy of the educational curricula that it teaches in schools."
(p.176). This policy is general in all the lands Islamized by jihad. The same
denial of Jewish and Christian history that preceded Islam is constantly
enforced. It is epitomized by the Arab-Israeli conflict where Israel is called a
colonial and usurper people in its own land, a dismissal of the whole Biblical
and post-Biblical history on which Christianity rests. Europe’s collusion with
the PLO and its replacement policy fits well the duplicity described by Isaac
concerning the Christians – but in the case of Israel, this duplicity which is
consonant with the Islamic refusal of the Bible, destroys Christianity itself.